heart's swing

“Heart’s swing. O so securely fastened

to what invisible bough? Who, who gave you that push,

so that you swung me up into the leaves?

How close I was to the fruit, delectable. But not-to-remain

is this moment’s essence. Only the closeness….”

            -- excerpt from an unnamed poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s like walking a tightrope—trying to will my body to maintain balance, focus, and the exhilaration of keeping momentum atop such an un-sturdy foundation. I hoped I would be strong enough to never come down from the high I felt in New Mexico, on all those southwestern highways, throughout those blessed six weeks of rehabilitation, rejuvenation, and exploration. I wanted that serenity I achieved to be long-lasting. But my heart’s swing keeps plunging back toward the hard dirt of earth; swooping upward; then plunging again.

The first day back at work was deadening; I felt taken captive—the dial of my intellect set back to pause, the peacefulness of my mind sent a-flurry. But my heart did, metaphorically, keep beating. It ached with sadness, not wanting to return to the same old routine; yet it also pulsed with hopefulness—certain that it could swing itself back to those heights—at least at times, if not with permanency.

On day four, optimism fell from the sky as well. I spent hours conducting an investigation—minute by minute unfolding layers of an unbelievable and dreadful story. My favorite new staff member, someone whom I and the rest of my team found impressively inspiring, proved to be a crook. He’d been taking money from us for months, lying expertly through both tears and a dazzling smile. He’d opened up to me to blind me, I understood now. He’d breached my trust in a dramatic way, and he’d self-sabotaged, forcing me to fire someone I otherwise thought was outstanding at his job. For both I was unfathomably angry. He’d also introduced me to a new level of worry, as it had to be some serious desperation that would cause a person to steal from children, which is what stealing from my particular employer really is. Thus he’d also generated for me a consuming anxiety. And he’d added his full-time job to my already overloaded plate. My second week back proved to be one of the most exhausting of my work life.

Week three began on a gorgeous Sunday, the temperature in the 60s, the sun crisp in the air, me and a friend happy to hike the foothills for hours, idle our time away at the high point, my heart’s swing frozen momentarily at the peak of its arch as I found zen again overlooking the ocean and bay, the city and east bay, the hovering prowess of Mt. Diablo. I arrived home feeling well again—only to get a phone call, one of life’s most dreaded phone calls. My mom was nearly crying, letting me know that Grandpa was declining quickly and would not last but a few more days. He’d gotten pneumonia and shingles three weeks earlier, and now he was surviving on morphine. The nurse said he’d stopped eating. My grandmother said he would die that night.

He waited until the morning, until his three living children had all arrived. At the nurse’s ushering, they and my grandmother left the room for a short walk; when they returned, he’d ceased breathing. My mother saw a dead body for the first time in her life. My mother, always daddy’s little girl, saw the dead body of her father and wished with all her might to not have to let him go.

I arrived the next evening. I missed all the story-telling and half of my relatives, and I left my grandmother after just a three-day visit. But oh did my heart rebound during those few days with her, this old lady who has shown me the most unconditional love of my life. This magical old lady who shooed me out the door after a not-long-enough visit because she was excited for what I had to do the next day, and the one after that.

The first day back from my grandmother’s I went to the doctor—the infertility specialist—and I got started on the process of becoming a single mom. Right now I’m in the process of getting loads of tests done to make sure my body can nurture a child; right now is a time of patience, and of unpredictability, yet it feels undeniably certain. I am going to be a mother, one way or another. This is no longer something I’m going to do; it’s something I am actively working on. My heart’s swing has flung itself back toward the sky.

The second day back I went to dim sum with two people who once interviewed me for my dream job—and who spent five hours that day trying to woo me into considering it again. Right now I’m in the phase of waiting and seeing; I told them I was absolutely interested, and now they’re going to the mat for me, proposing the idea to their fellow board members. Right now is a time of patience, and of unpredictability, yet it feels undeniably hopeful. I may get to have my dream job; even if I don’t, there are two people out there who think I’m phenomenal and are dying to have me run their show. My heart’s swing has flung itself further upward, now trying to grasp onto a cloud.

It’s most likely that the swing will fall again; most likely that I will drop from the tight rope at least some of the times I tread across it. But I am grateful for all this heart swing activity. I am grateful to have back the emotional life without which I had feared I had learned to live.

the hardest drive

3.7 miles. Nothing compared to the 300- and 400-mile days I drove all over New Mexico. But this morning I took what I honestly think was the hardest drive of my life—the brief journey back to a job I just can't get excited to return to. Tears filled my eyes as soon as I turned off my street and onto the main road through town. After flipping from radio station to radio station, I switched to a CD by a band, Dehlia Low, that, along with The Be Good Tanyas, sang the soundtrack to my southwestern journey. I thought hearing that music would bolster my energy; all it did was bring my heart down. Driving from one side of MP to the other does not an expedition make. Returning to a job that offers me the same experiences month in and month out leads to nothing like adventure. There would be no flutters of awe in my heart on this day—just the hum drum feeling of doing the same thing over again for the thousandth (literally) time.

I drove home listening to track 5 -- a song called "Ravens and Crows." Got out of the car, came into the house, scrolled through my iphone camera until I found some of the videos I made driving New Mexico highways with the phone held up to the window and Dehlia Low playing in the car. Picked back up in the same song and listened as I watched the ramshackle houses and barren boughs of winter trees sweep past my car window. As I watched mountains rise and fall back into broad valleys. As I felt my heart at once vacant and whole.

I might just move there one day!

soul journey

“The Broken Ground” by Wendell Berry

The opening out and out

body yielding body:

the breaking

through which the new

comes, perching

above its shadow

on the piling up

darkened broken old

husks of itself:

but opening to flower
opening to fruit opening

to the sweet marrow

of the seed—

                        taken

from what was, from

what could have been.

What is left

is what is.

The breaking through which the new comes. Berry knew that when it comes to wellness of spirit, you can’t get to a new place by just closing your eyes in the old one and willing it to be different. To move from one state of mind to another is metamorphosis. That kind of change requires something to crack open, something else to push forth. A bud won’t blossom without breaking its form. That kind of growth is painful; it’s delicate and difficult and who knows how long it will hold. But the act of it is also illuminating. The rising above those husks of previous selves gives one a new vantage point, the heart a new pace of beat. What is left is what is. Hallelujah for what is left still being of (beautiful) substance—for not being a void!

I went to New Mexico a bundle of exhaustion and stress. I’d worked six frantic 75-hour weeks in order to be able to leave. And that kind of time commitment was just the icing on a job that had been dominating my life for more than three years. I was taking a pause from a keen mixture of love and hate—feeling on the one hand so proud of the work we do (of my role in it, of the dedication of our staff, of the kids we serve) and on the other so miserable over being miserable for so long. I thrive on diving deep into lots of different interests; I never felt worn out when I worked 40-hour weeks, had multiple regular evening volunteer gigs, wrote often, and took photography classes in addition to being my social butterfly self. But diving shallowly into millions of pieces and parts of one thing has been draining the heck out of me. That’s because the reward is missing—the bounty of insights gained through deep focus or deep application of my skills, the strength of personal bonds formed when dedicating my time to a few kids rather than to hundreds and hundreds and in theory. And as though having an all-consuming job that doesn’t give much back to me wasn’t causing enough stress, there was the part of me that knew I’d spent my life savings on graduate school to be able to give this new career a try and was disappointed in myself for not finding it rewarding enough to want to stay in. What could be more rewarding than knowing that thousands of children growing up in really tough situations have a supportive, nurturing, and I hope life-changing place to be after school and in the summer, when they are most at risk of finding detrimental paths to follow instead? But the thing is, a body includes a heart and a mind, and if my job gives me only distant connection to the heart’s rewards of the work, it gives me almost no opportunity to reward the mind.

I went to New Mexico thinking I needed to do two things: first, to reignite the creative side of my brain, believing that submerging myself in creative writing for days on end would give me the deep focus and the sense of craftsmanship that I’ve craved throughout the time I’ve held my current job; and second, to unwind, let go of stress, feel well and happy again—for I am too much of an optimist to spend so many mornings waking up dreading the day; I wanted to return to feeling joyful about the life I live.

In week two in Albuquerque, I began to see that those goals might not be quite right. If one thing has frustrated me more than any other over the past three years, it’s been spending so much of my time on one thing. Thus the prospect of spending most of my time off writing came to feel like the wrong approach. To regain a sense of balance, I needed to put multiple things into play. In addition, I was utterly worn out; to revive creativity, I needed more than just to will it back. I needed new inputs to stimulate it. So I wrote, and I read book after book that had been piling up on my coffee table, and I read news articles and education articles and the Huffington Post, and I researched jobs and applied for a handful, and I drove many hundreds of miles to see stunning scenery and take thousands of photographs and listen to fantastic music for being on the open road and feel my heart fill with the sensation of soaring, and I watched movies, and I researched soup recipes, and I slept—ten hours a night for the first month. That’s where I realized that the unwinding part would take some serious work too. I had sleep to catch up on, stress to expel, and liveliness to rediscover. I lived like a hermit for four weeks, seeing almost no one, and it felt good, because I needed to nurse and nurture myself back from true depletion.

In week two, I also dug my hole deeper. I hit a wall with my writing, and through doing so I came to acknowledge that I’d severely hit a wall in general. I had, for three years, been living a life that did not make me happy, and though in the first few months of the job I’d allowed in depression, I had, for multiple years now, been actively working to put an end to the situation. But nothing was coming of it. I’m sure I’ve applied to at least fifteen jobs per year since getting this one, but I’ve never been offered a new one. In week two in Albuquerque, I felt squarely stuck. Don’t want the job I have, can’t find the one I want. I felt at a loss for what I should do next.

Remarkably, in acknowledging that—in first writing it in a blog post and then announcing it to my dear friend Jenny, who has been with me through so many soul journeys over the past 15 years, and then announcing it each morning to myself—in acknowledging it, I found that though at a loss I wasn’t exactly lost. I was in a place of not being there yet but not being nowhere. I was in a finding place. A place where everything is cleared away, like an attic that’s been emptied of its contents. Emptied of what has been and filled with an air of what could be. Husks cleared away so a bud has space to grow.

On week four, on the phone with my mom, in attempting to answer her question of what I had gone to New Mexico to find, I discovered that perhaps the answer lay in an entirely different garden than the one I’d been trying to make grow.

My mom asked me that question and my response had nothing to do with my career. It had nothing to do with leaving the life I’m in. It had only to do with pursuing the thing that I care most about bringing into being.

For years, I’ve said that I feel I don’t have to get married—that I’ll only do that if I find someone really worth marrying for me—but I do have to be a mother. It’s the one thing that I don’t want to live life without doing. Without being. Nine months ago, when I turned 35 and looked in a metaphorical mirror to accept the facts that the biological clock is ticking and if I want to have a baby I may have to do so on my own, I panicked. I was sure that I couldn’t be a single mom with the job I have now, that I couldn’t afford to have a baby in the Bay Area, that I couldn’t succeed at raising it without a sort of help that I would have none of here. To become a single mom would require moving back east to be near family, to live somewhere more affordable. It would require leaving the part of the country I have loved living in best. It felt like it would also mean giving up on love. Those thoughts broke my heart, and they scared the heck out of me at the same time. When, last May, I went to the doctor to learn what the process of having a baby on my own would be like, at the end of the conversation, I asked for a deadline, which she wouldn’t give me. I asked again—by what age do I have to start trying if I have any chance of doing this biologically? She said simply, “You start trying when you’re ready.” I knew at that moment that I was not ready.

On the phone with my mom, in week four of my New Mexican hermitage, having given it no previous thought on the trip and having read just three pages of a memoir a friend lent me about a woman who did something similar, I announced that I was, in fact, ready. It had been a terrifying thing to consider sooner because of all the changes it would require, and I—stressed, unhappy, and exhausted—hadn’t had the energy to clear my head to think about it. But after a few weeks of recuperation and loving living somewhere else and moving past feeling lost just because I was at a loss, it was like I had tilled the soil of my garden, and I had laid down seed, and now a little sprig of life was breaking ground. Over the next few years—as I know it will take significant time for my infertile ovaries to allow me to become pregnant or an adoption agency to allow me to take home a dear little one—I feel sure that a bud will rise from the green stem of the plant, and as it opens into a flower, I will undertake the hardest journey yet of my life. For now, all I can do is open all the doors to making that happen. In three weeks I will meet with a fertility specialist. After that, I will begin to learn about adoption. As I get those balls rolling, I will also look for new jobs in the Bay Area and also in Washington, where my mom lives, and Jenny lives, and other family members and dear old friends live too. And as I do what it takes for my body to yield a new body, or my heart to yield a new heart, I will be a different being than I have been, and in my metamorphosis I think I will continue to feel something that blossomed during weeks five and six of my journey, as I drove almost 2000 miles of southwestern highway, seeing and climbing on and making art from so many marvelous new places and creations. That thing I would call serenity.